Amarillo, TX – In a stunning report released by the Coalition To Understand School Lunches last week, evidence was revealed that all school lunches are made from just hamsters, and copious amounts of the seasoning, Mrs. Dash. This includes snacks such as pizza, ham(ster)burgers, Mac & Cheese, and other popular choices.
“These little bastards will eat anything,” said long-time lunch lady, Margaret Drooble, “and the budgets of these schools have been stretched since I was a child, so decisions had to be made.”
But why hamsters?
“I can’t say this for certain, but I believe it began at a school in Ohio sometime in the early sixties,” Mrs. Drooble continued. “A class was tasked with caring for a group of hamsters, and this coincided with an annual budget meeting. When it was determined that cuts needed to be made, school lunches were first on the chopping block, as nutrition for small children during school hours was deemed ‘unnecessary’. Several teachers pushed back, and a brave, visionary woodshop teacher took the initiative to round up the little critters and prepare savory meals out of them.”
Because school lunches come in a variety of choices, our investigative team was curious how they were all made with one primary meat ingredient.
“Oh jeez, you’d be amazed at what these fuzzy little blobs can be made into when mixed with eggs, heat, and a little old-fashioned elbow grease,” chef Andre Blurp told us. “And add the Mrs. Dash seasoning, and…well, it’s really something special. Turning them into pizza or burgers or pot pies and whatnot is just a matter of how much mixing and preparation you wanna do, really. Last year I made a meatloaf the size of a Smart car and lemme tell ya, the kids loved it. Fed them for a solid week. They had no idea they were eating small rodents, which I really credit to the seasoning, and the kids being kinda idiots.”
As school budgets were stretched thin all across America in the sixties and beyond, a pioneering group of educators and culinary wizards decided there was a way to apply the hamster lunch method discovered in Ohio months earlier to schools everywhere. Captain Joe Gougeballer took the lead on the project, setting up a home base in Amarillo Texas. “Ya know, kids will eat almost anything you put in front of them at school. They must feel like, because we are grown-ups, that we know best so they just chow down whatever slop is served to them. Of course, most of them eat boogers so it makes perfect sense. Hamsters are so easy to purchase on the underground food market that rolling out this project to the masses was really easy. We almost went in another direction and dug in with pigeons, but for some reason adding Mrs. Dash to their cooked flesh tasted like old gym socks, which is really the only thing young kids won’t eat from our research.”
So just how massive is the Hamster Meal Program you ask?
“Oh wow, yeah we have, at this point, ninety-four percent of all public school cafeterias and we just broke through sixty percent of the private locations. Some institutions have started testing their food so it makes it challenging, but we’ve developed a “beef enhancer” that can fool most tests, replicating beef protein in samples. We just explain the hamster hair they find as sampling errors and transit contamination,” says Terrence Cruller, the senior VP of operations. “Most food testing reveals rat bones, doodie, teeth, and bits of glass anyway, so a little hair really isn’t all that alarming.
We were offered a sample of “NY Style pizza” made from the hamsters and Mrs. Dash, and despite refusing profusely, eventually we relented after threats of violence and possible drugging. It tasted like a combination of shoe leather dipped in a litter box with salty cheese and a tomato-like bitterness, finishing with regurgitated vomit. We gave it three out of four stars for a school lunch.
“It’s easy to judge something like this, and complain that we are hurting the kids or not offering them the best options for their health, but one only needs to look at what this program has helped facilitate. Most schools in the south can afford books now, the ones they haven’t banned, which are most of them, but they can also afford janitorial services and personal assistants for their football players. Teachers have been getting annual .5% raises again for the first time since nineteen sixty-three, and several small countries that export the hamsters have been able to afford to open their first hospital with the influx of cash. We are not just feeding lives, we’re saving them too,” Captain Gougeballer tells us. We asked why they call him Captain, and he became furious and had us removed from the premises, but not before offering us a generous bag of hamster jerky for the ride home.
All requests we made to speak with senior education officials, superintendents, principals, as well as federal education officials were denied, as was our interview request with Mrs. Dash, who still lives in her childhood home in Texarkana with her eleven dogs, longtime domestic partner “Beau,” along with her rare collection of ancient walking sticks made from human bones.
– Gary Lindonbeet, Soggy Staff
The Soggy Blanket 